Meet the Tor Summer of Privacy and Outreachy Interns

> It would be nice to join the discussion

Welcome!

Tor users do not often have the chance to report some genuinely good news, but I'd like to share this:

techdirt.com
International Standards Body Rejects Weakened IOT Encryption Methods Pushed By The NSA
from the bleak-days-for-Big-Surveillance dept

> The NSA has again been outed for pushing compromised encryption standards. An early Snowden leak showed the agency paid RSA $10 million to promote a weakened encryption standard. RSA offered up a denial that didn't exactly contradict the evidence provided by the leaked documents. A few years later, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) removed the Dual Elliptic Curve algorithm from its recommendations, citing its distrust of the agency pushing for its adoption: the NSA. Dual EC appeared to be deliberately weakened, reducing encryption-breaking efforts to a matter of seconds, rather than hours or days.
>
> The NSA is once again at the center of an encryption controversy. This time the intended target of weakened encryption standards is the Internet of Things. As Kieran McCarthy of The Register reports, the NSA's hard-sell approach backfired, leaving its preferred attack vectors encryption algorithms locked out by an international standards body.

With some effort, you can find archived Snowden-leaked documents at EFF.org which detail NSA's decades-old efforts to manipulate NIST in order to ensure non-government encryption is sufficiently weak that their computers can break it. (All indications are that they have not always succeeded, but many experts are getting more and more worried about aging AES standard.)

Some of us have long urged pro-privacy techies to experiment with "honeypot" entrapment of state-sponsored spooks, and to try to develop software or devices which can warn of "Evil maid" attacks (probably the most dangerous kind). Anyone interested in securing their laptop (especially when it is sometimes out of your physical control, such as when traveling) will want to read this:

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/28/computer-malware-tampering/
It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked. I Spent Two Years Finding Out.
Micah Lee
28 Apr 2018

> But there is a sneaky class of attack, called “evil maid” attacks, that disk encryption alone cannot protect against. Evil maid attacks work like this: An attacker (such as a malicious hotel housekeeper, for example) gains temporary access to your encrypted laptop. Although they can’t decrypt your data, they can spend a few minutes tampering with your laptop and then leave it exactly where they found it. When you come back and type in your credentials, now you have been hacked.
>
> Exactly how an evil maid attack would work against your laptop depends on many factors: the type of computer you use, what operating system you use, which disk encryption software you use, and the configuration of firmware used to boot your computer, firmware which I’ll call “BIOS,” although it can also go by acronyms like EFI and UEFI. Some computers have considerably better technology to prevent evil maid attacks than others – for example, attackers have to do more advanced tampering to hack a Windows laptop encrypted with BitLocker than they do to hack a Mac laptop encrypted with FileVault (as of now, anyway) or a Linux laptop encrypted with LUKS.

Some Linux users have long complained about the limitations of LUKS, but it will be hard to overcome this until hardware manufacturers decide to treat Linux users with the respect we deserve. To make matters worse, it is generally agreed that Linus Torvalds has generally been less concerned with cybersecurity issues than we would desire in the leader of kernel development. (He was recently grilled by the US Congress concerning security problems with Linux servers.)

> The issue of tampering is particularly relevant for human rights workers, activists, journalists, and software developers, all of whom hold sensitive data sought by powerful potential attackers. People in these vocations are often keenly aware of the security of their laptops while traveling – after all, laptops store critical secrets like communication with sources, lists of contacts, password databases, and encryption keys used to vouch for source code you write, or to give you access to remote servers.
> ...
> [In one type of Evil Maid attack] an attacker could replace your BIOS firmware with malicious firmware. When you power on your computer, the very first program that your computer runs is your BIOS firmware. The job of this program is to initialize all of your hardware – your memory, disks, Wi-Fi adapter, video card, USB ports, and everything else – and then ultimately boot an operating system, typically the one stored on your hard disk.
>
> When you format your disk and install a new operating system on your computer, your BIOS firmware doesn’t change. This is because this program isn’t stored on your hard disk at all. Instead, it’s stored in a small chip on your computer’s motherboard called an SPI flash chip.
>
> This is why BIOS malware is so stealthy – you can’t get rid of it by formatting your hard disk, and it can spy on you across operating systems, such as if you boot to a Tails USB stick.

An old story which remains relevant shows that there are even nastier possibilities than Evil Maid attacks:

wired.com
This ‘Demonically Clever’ Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip
Andy Greenberg
1 Jun 2016

> Security flaws in software can be tough to find. Purposefully planted ones—hidden backdoors created by spies or saboteurs—are often even stealthier. Now imagine a backdoor planted not in an application, or deep in an operating system, but even deeper, in the hardware of the processor that runs a computer. And now imagine that silicon backdoor is invisible not only to the computer’s software, but even to the chip’s designer, who has no idea that it was added by the chip’s manufacturer, likely in some farflung Chinese factory. And that it’s a single component hidden among hundreds of millions or billions. And that each one of those components is less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

Note that we know Evil Maid attacks occur in the wild (they are well documented in the Snowden leaks and in leaks from Hacking Team), but so far AFAIK attacks in which chips have been clandestinely redesigned for the purposes of espionage have not yet been found in the wild. But this might well be due to the extreme difficulty of finding such chip backdoors, which is orders of magnitude harder than the difficulty of detecting sophisticated Evil Maid attacks, as explained in Micah Lee's article.

I am glad to see that Lee says he still thinks trawling for spook attacks is a good idea.